World Press on Iran, Turkey and Caucasus (September 3-5, 2011)

The Washington Post reported on Sunday that Iran’s parliament speaker has postponed a visit to North Korea and China because of an unspecified illness. The Associated Press wrote that Larijani was postponing the trip because he was not scheduled to meet with sufficiently high-ranking North Koreans. The lawmaker spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the trip. Last week the Iranian parliament’s website had said Larijani would be in Pyongyang for a three-day visit beginning Sunday. He was to visit Beijing afterward. The visit to North Korea would have been the first visit by an Iranian parliament speaker since the 1980s, when Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani visited Pyongyang.

The same agency reported today that ran’s Revolutionary Guard soldiers have killed at least 30 members of Kurdish opposition group in fighting near the Iraqi border, a senior military official said. Colonel Hamid Ahmadi was quoted by state TV as saying that 40 other members of the Iranian Kurdish group PEJAK were injured during fierce clashes outside the border city of Sardasht. PEJAK, which stands for the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan, has been involved in sporadic armed clashes with Iranian forces in recent years. The rebels say they are fighting for greater rights for their minority community.

On Sunday The Guardian published the article headlined “Israel and Turkey: sailing into choppy waters.” It says that the Israeli-Turkish rupture will bear on the next installment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – the attempt by the US to forestall a general assembly vote on Palestinian statehood this month. A proposal for new peace talks is being circulated to dissuade the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, from pressing the vote. This would elevate the Palestinians from observing entity at the UN to observer state, enhancing its representation and its ability to pursue cases such as the Mavi Marmara in the international criminal court.

The same information agency reported that a Turkish hacker group diverted traffic to a number of high-profile websites including the Telegraph, UPS, Betfair, Vodafone, National Geographic, computer-maker Acer and technology news site the Register on Sunday night, putting unwary users at risk of having passwords, emails and other details stolen. Industry experts warned people not to log on to sites such as Betfair because their details could be stolen. Some people viewing the sites thought that they had been hacked directly, with the sites appearing to show a message in Turkish by a group called Turk Guvenligi, which last month carried out a similar attack on a Korean company

“Iran’s First Nuclear Power Plant Goes Into Operation” is an article published by The New York Times. It says that Iran’s first nuclear power plant has finally begun to provide electricity to the national grid, official news media reported on Sunday, a long-delayed milestone in the nuclear ambitions of a country the West fears is covertly trying to develop atomic weapons. The $1 billion, 1,000-megawatt Bushehr plant will be formally inaugurated Sept. 12, by which time it will be operating at 40 percent capacity, Hamid Khadem Qaemi. The plant is the first of what Iran says will be a network of nuclear facilities that will reduce reliance on its fossil fuels and is a showpiece of what it calls a purely peaceful atomic program.